An essential part of a wireless service provider's business is its ability to provide adequate communication capabilities to its customers. In order to provide such capabilities, wireless service providers deploy communication antennas on towers, rooftops, buildings, and other tall structures. The height of such structures allows the radio signal from each communication antenna to travel several miles, establishing a geographic area within which service may be provided to customers. Wireless service providers typically install several directional communication antennas per site as multiple directional communication antennas are needed for increased capacity and reception.
In order to provide the required radio signal throughout a defined area, each directional antenna is intended to face a specific direction (referred to as “azimuth”) relative to true north, to be inclined at a specific downward angle with respect to the horizontal in the plane of the azimuth (referred to as “downtilt”) and to be vertically aligned with respect to the horizontal (referred to as “skew”). Undesired changes in azimuth, downtilt, and skew will detrimentally affect the coverage of a directional antenna. These alignments may be likened to the axes commonly used to describe the attitude of an aircraft: Azimuth corresponds to the yaw of an aircraft about a vertical axis; skew corresponds to the roll of an aircraft about its longitudinal axis; and downtilt corresponds to the pitch of the nose of an aircraft above or below a horizontal plane (or about a lateral axis extending horizontally through the aircraft at right angles to the longitudinal axis). In general, the more accurate the installation, the better the network performance that may be achieved within the area served by the antenna. Directional antenna installations are performed by tower companies who use certified tower climbers to carryout such installations.
An antenna's azimuth, downtilt and/or skew can change over time, due to the presence of high winds, corrosion, poor initial installation, vibration, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, or other factors. It is common for wireless service providers to conduct periodic audits of their communication antennas to ensure that each antenna has not deviated significantly from its desired azimuth, downtilt and/or skew. Wireless service providers frequently hire third party tower companies to perform audits and to make any necessary adjustments to maintain the desired azimuth, downtilt and skew. Such audits, however, may be labor intensive and dangerous, frequently requiring certified tower climbers to physically inspect each antenna, and to take appropriate measurements to determine any deviance from the desired positioning. This task can become even more time consuming if many towers are affected as a result of a hurricane or storm, in which case it could take between two to four months to figure out which towers have been affected, as the antennas have to be checked one by one.
Given the present state of the art, there is a need in the art for means for remote and continuous monitoring to determine whether and to what extent the desired physical positioning of an antenna has been altered.